NYT: The State of the George W. Bush Joke (anti-Bush humor)

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NYT: The State of the George W. Bush Joke (anti-Bush humor)

The State of the George W. Bush Joke

Will Ferrell, in flight suit, as President Bush at a benefit for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Los Angeles this spring. The impersonation has shifted from a bumbler to an ideologue.

By JASON ZENGERLE
Published: August 22, 2004

....To mangle a presidential line, the state of the George W. Bush joke is mean and partisan. On late-night shows, in political advertisements and in the fertile new realm of Internet comedy, jokes about the president are much harsher than were the jokes about his father or Bill Clinton, or even the jokes that were circulating when George W. Bush first took office. Back then, the president was teased about poor syntax and low I.Q. Now many Bush jokes portray the president as an irresponsible, duplicitous menace. In part, this change is due to an increasingly unpopular war and an unsteady economy. It also may be that all comedy has become harsher in recent years. But partly it is because, since Mr. Bush took office, the left has belatedly rediscovered humor as a political tool.

The best indicator of the state of George W. Bush humor may be Will Ferrell. Like Mr. Carvey, Mr. Ferrell made a name for himself playing a President Bush on "Saturday Night Live." Initially, Mr. Ferrell's impersonation was also of the kinder and gentler variety. During the 2000 campaign and the president's first years in office, Mr. Ferrell's Bush was a harmless, amiable dunce � a man who answered "strategery" when asked to sum up his candidacy in one word, and who played with a ball of twine while his brother Jeb and Al Gore discussed the disputed election....It's doubtful anyone at the White House is laughing along with Mr. Ferrell now. Although he left "Saturday Night Live" in 2002, Mr. Ferrell recently reprised his Bush impersonation, first at a fund-raiser for the environmental organization the Natural Resources Defense Council in May and then in an Internet advertisement for the liberal political group America Coming Together released late last month. (The ad can be viewed at http://whitehousewest.com.) As Mr. Ferrell plays him today, the president is still a dunce, entranced by his Gameboy and terrified of a horse grazing innocently nearby. But he has become an ideologue. "There are certain liberal agitators out there who'd like you to believe my administration is not doing such a good job," he warns in the ad. "Of course, these are people such as Howard Stern, Richard Clark and the news."...

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Jon Stewart, the host of "The Daily Show," has repeatedly insisted that he's nonpartisan ("I'm a Whig," he recently told Fox News). But lately his Bush jokes have started to seem like a sustained argument with the president, as when Mr. Bush recently made a speech in which he declared, eight times, that as a result of the war in Iraq "America is safer." Speaking directly to a videotaped image of the president, Mr. Stewart demanded: "What criteria are you using to prove this? What evidence is there other than you saying it?" But thanks to a montage, the president only repeated the claim. "So that's what it comes down to," Mr. Stewart intoned. "The Bush administration's strategy to fight terrorism is repetition."...

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.... the recent success of Mr. Stewart, as well as best-selling authors like Michael Moore and Al Franken, may have convinced Democratic strategists of the value of comedy. "One of the reasons people get involved in politics is social," says Sarah Leonard, a spokeswoman for the liberal group America Coming Together, which is running anti-Bush voter registration drives in 17 swing states. "And people want to belong to something that's fun and has a lot of energy behind it."...And it's not just political pros putting Bush jokes to political use. The spirit seems to have also taken hold at the grass roots. When MoveOn held a "Bush in 30 Seconds" contest last fall in which it asked people to come up with their own anti-Bush ads, it received more than 1,500 submissions � a number of them making their political points with humor....This same lightheartedness will be on display among some of the protesters at the Republican National Convention next week. "Billionaires for Bush," for example � the political street theater group that features protestors in tuxes and ball gowns chanting slogans like "Blood for Oil" and "Small Government, Big Wars" � has planned a "Million Billionaire March" and a "Vigil for Corporate Welfare."...The greatest evidence of this new jokey spirit on the left can be found on the Internet, which is home to hundreds if not thousands of independent sites put up by random people who happen to have a political grudge and a sense of humor. Shortly after 9/11, David Rees launched a cartoon strip called "Get Your War On" (www.mnftiu.cc /mnftiu.cc/war.html). While the mainstream media were still waving flags and speaking in hushed tones, Mr. Rees was attracting a devoted following for his devastatingly sarcastic take on the news....The strip eventually migrated beyond the Web into a book and onto the pages of Rolling Stone magazine....But perhaps the greatest limitation of the Bush joke as a political tool is that its audience is self-selecting. "Humor is used to incite the faithful, not convince swing voters," says MoveOn's Laura Dawn....

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/arts/television/X22ZENG.html